When they returned to America, General Garfield was President of the United States, who, though a Western man by birth, had been educated in New England, at Williams College in Massachusetts, where he had been graduated twenty-five years before, and which he had a desire to revisit; and it was arranged that he should leave Washington in the morning of July 2d, with as many of his cabinet as could be spared from the seat of government, and come on to New York and all be entertained at "Ardsley," and the next day proceed up the Hudson and across the country to Williamstown; a programme which was interrupted by the terrible news that on arriving at the station in Washington he had been shot, an event that instantly recalled the assassination of Lincoln. At once there rose a cry of horror from one end of the land to the other, and for weeks the whole country was watching by the bedside of the illustrious sufferer. Of course, the sympathy for the wife and children was universal, but Mr. Field was the first to give this sympathy a practical direction. With his quick eye he saw the condition in which they would be left by the death of the President, as for them the law makes no provision. His salary stops at the very day and hour that he ceases to live, nor is there a pension settled upon his family, nor can anything be paid from the national treasury except by special act of Congress. In this extremity it occurred to Mr. Field that what the Government failed to do should be made up by private generosity; and even before General Garfield's death he started a subscription, heading it with five thousand dollars, and taking it in person to his rich friends. The self imposed task occupied him several months, in which he raised a fund of over three hundred and sixty thousand dollars, which was put into United States four per cent. bonds, yielding an interest of over twelve thousand dollars a year, to be paid quarterly during the life of Mrs. Garfield, and then to go to her children. It was a great satisfaction to have thus provided for those who bore the name of a President of the United States, so that they should be able to live in the comfort and dignity that befitted the family of one who had occupied the most exalted station in the government. Not content with this, Mr. Field went to Washington, and urged upon his friends in Congress, and finally succeeded in getting passed, a bill giving to the widows of all Presidents a pension of $5,000, which, it added to his gratification to know, would apply to the venerable Mrs. Polk: and that still goes, and will go during her lifetime, to the wife of General Grant, as the slight expression of a nation's gratitude.